Education has the potential to contribute to social transformation through teaching and learning in and about the world. This broad potential is acknowledged and promoted by international organisations like UNESCO (2020a), which presents education as a key enabler in achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, through the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) approach. Central to the SDGs is a call for a more just and equal world for all, which in general terms aligns with UN and UNESCO’s mandate to address structural mechanisms of inequality and injustice, including structural racism that works against the universal and non-discriminatory ambitions of the SDGs. UNESCO was founded on the premise of an anti-racist future, and describes its work against racism and discrimination in the following terms:

UNESCO has led the work against racism for several decades, with a long trajectory from the 1950s seminal work on “race” to the 1978 adoption of the Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice. UNESCO is uniquely placed to scale up action through its crosscutting mandate covering education, culture, social and human sciences, natural sciences, and communication and information to combat racism and discrimination. (UNESCO, 2023, p. 1)

With this strong emphasis on combating racism, we examine how racism is addressed in UNESCO’s (2019) ESD for 2030 framework. This framework was adopted as part of efforts to guide its member states in their achievement of the SDGs, and is elaborated on in Education for Sustainable Development – A roadmap (UNESCO, 2020). In the roadmap, sustainable development is understood as encompassing all the 17 SDGs, including environmental, social, and economic dimensions of development. These include SDG 10 on reduced inequality within and among countries, and the call to “empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status” (United Nations, 2015. p. 23).

We see this sort of institutional commitment to combating racism and discrimination, over time, as a reflection of theorising about the mechanisms and function of structural racism, working within and between countries. In particular, we draw on macro theorising of scholars like Fraser (2022) and Moore (2017; 2018) that points to systemic racism operating at the level of a global colour line, with parallel divisions within countries. We connect this with theories on ignorance (Mills, 2007, 2015) and explore the implications of this key dimension of the maintenance of historical and ongoing inequalities being largely excluded from the roadmap as a project of social transformation. Our approach includes, however, consideration of ways in which the ESD project, and particularly the current ESD for 2030 Roadmap (UNESCO, 2020), indirectly connects with and provides opportunities for educational work that engages with racism as a structural feature of global socio-economic systems, in the push to combat it and achieve the SDGs.  

UNESCO’s roadmap is directed towards its member states and provides a tool to guide countries in their implementation of ESD. The roadmap is a 73-page document, divided into four chapters: 1) An urgent call for action, 2) ESD for 2030, 3) Priority action areas, and 4) Implementation, and has five annexes, including the ESD for 2030 framework that it is based on (UNESCO, 2020a). It sets out five priority action areas for ESD to its member states and other stakeholders, focusing on policy, educators, learners, youth and community (UNESCO, 2020a). Drawing on Asdal and Reinertsen’s (2022) work on policy analysis, it is relevant to contextualise the document as ‘part of a site’, as the framework operates within larger debates on education and sustainability. The roadmap is also a ‘tool’ (Asdal & Reinertsen, 2022) for member states and other stakeholders, declaring what ‘should’ and ‘must’ be done to implement ESD. As such we acknowledge that such documents make up a ‘site in itself’ (Asdal & Reinertsen, 2022), in this case a result of a longer process, including a symposium series in four different countries, with more than 250 stakeholders, and a final consultation process with member states (UNESCO, 2020a, pp. 55–56). However, our analytical focus is on the roadmap as a tool that articulates the way forward for ESD, with the ambition of education contributing to the SDG’s envisaged transformation of the world. We bring a critical reading to the roadmap’s articulated ESD vision, and its treatment of structural racism, inspired by the critical theorising of structural inequalities of institutionalised capitalist society. This approach aligns with Diem et al.’s (2022) critical policy analysis, whereby our theoretical orientation shaped the selection and reading of the roadmap. We coded the roadmap document in terms of major themes and sub-themes, and specifically looking for the ways it engages with structural inequalities and their causes in society, and structural racism in particular. As we quickly established the absence of the terms ‘race’ and ‘racism’, we set out to “elicit meaning from what is not said” (Young & Diem, 2018, p. 87), extending to what Mills (2015) calls an ‘epistemology of ignorance’. On these grounds we developed our key analytical arguments about the text, which the following section is divided into: An anthropocentric narrative, the silencing of structural racism, and the limitations of the roadmap’s account of structural causes.

UNESCO’s (2020) ESD for 2030 roadmap can be seen as part of a history of efforts in global policy to expand the horizon and purposes of schooling toward social transformation, and a longer trajectory of ESD in particular. The roadmap’s emphasis on education’s role in addressing the ongoing climate emergency, and in advancing the whole package of the SDGs, is promising, as are the (limited) references to wider structural features or causes of ongoing inequalities that need to be addressed. But first and foremost, we argue that the absence of explicit reference to structural racism, and its connections to mechanisms of social and economic inequality in and through capitalism, aligns with other examples of racial erasure (Sriprakash et al., 2023). Whether seen through a racial capitalist lens, or Fraser’s (2022) conception of institutionalised capitalist society, this erasure highlights an area requiring urgent attention in the ESD agenda. With structural racism’s absence, we are left with an inadequate analysis of the current situation, contributing to an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ (Mills, 2015). Looking forward, a recent UNESCO (2021) report intended to inform policy and practice that reimagines education, argues that “to shape peaceful, just, and sustainable futures, education itself must be transformed” (p. 1). The report also advocates “pedagogies of solidarity” within transformed educational settings, which “recognize and redress the systematic exclusions and erasures imposed by racism, sexism, colonialism, and authoritarian regimes around the world” (UNESCO, 2021, p. 53). We highlight this report, as an example of a pedagogy with the potential to critically examine structural inequalities in the Capitalocene, including the mechanisms of structural racism, and as such to strengthen education as a key enabler in transforming the world.

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